Redefining Masculinity: The Changing Face of Male Characters on Television

2024-02-02 21:28:32

If you were asked to pick the manliest character ever seen on television, many would probably think of Tony Soprano or Walter White. You know, heroes whose so-cold-masculinity drives them. Tony Soprano wants to balance family life with work life, Walter White wants to provide for his family. These represent a generation of men who have passed from the screen, and each new gnarled male figure that followed them was no longer the same. But what does the television man look like today?

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The zeitgeist has also changed the way television creators design their characters. You hardly see what is called, sometimes derisively, “a man of old” anymore. And that’s perfectly fine, because the masculinity/femininity model changes all the time depending on the period. But to understand the masculinity model of 2024 we need to recall for a moment the previous generations. Relax, we won’t go back to the days of Colombo – but yes, it’s worth going back two decades for a moment.

After the outbursts of Tony Soprano, the charisma of Don Draper and the men of the horror missiles of Breaking Bad, we started to get a slightly more recent version of male characters. And perhaps the most excellent example of the male hybrid created during the previous decade is Saul Goodman – on the one hand, a slick lawyer and a cunning crook who enjoys the hunt more than he enjoys the prey. On the other hand, this is a man who had to rebuild himself from scratch after years of repeatedly hurting his pride.

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The choice of him for the character to lead the spin-off of “Breaking Bad”, his very repositioning as a hero, is a sign that you don’t need a mountain of muscles or a hot temper to be a leading man. Being a new archetype of the male hero character is emphasized against the background of the fact that everyone Jimmy fights with throughout the series is actually a different version of the same “old man” – his older and rigid brother Charles, the restrained but cruel Gus Fringe, the powerful and lacking members of the Salamanca family the restraints. That is until a change came that somewhat pushed this developing man to the side.

The Me Too era, remember? So he brought us back to the screen the same classic and tough man, but from a different angle – now there is a certain hostility in the look of the character, and he is relegated to the roles of villains. It is no coincidence that Jon Hamm plays Roy Tillman in the last season of “Fargo”, the sheriff who rules an entire county with a heavy hand, a character who is all about primitive masculine qualities. Next to the Don Draper charm of the mother (which definitely still exists there), we see the extreme of his forcefulness, violence and cruelty. Roy Tillman’s entire worldview is based on qualities and values ​​that were once considered masculine. So if the man of yesteryear is cast as the bad guy, who is the hero of 2024?

Well, he’s pretty much zero. Well, maybe actually fifty shades of zero. The new male protagonist will often be a person lacking in skills or charisma, one whose flaws outweigh his strengths. A good example of this is the protagonist of “The Boys”, Huey Campbell (Jack Henry Quaid), a man in his twenties who works in an electronics store and starts hunting superheroes. He doesn’t have any special powers, he’s basically quite a coward, but his desire to take revenge on the superheroes who took everything from him only promotes him. A completely casual man who decides to change his life, a kind of echo of that Walter White, minus the baldness. Homelander on the other hand? The Man.

The ancient masculine qualities – violence, power, charisma, revenge – have not completely disappeared from the screen. They are still there, but often function as an obstacle for a hero, as a characteristic force of the villain, and it seems that soon they will lose all trace of the positive effect they had. But where will the male figure develop from here? Quite a bit of this, one can assume, will be related to the future political-cultural discourse, but it is doubtful whether we will see a significant return to the old model. A maximum of a few action series to flatter the conservative audience as well.

But who knows, maybe soon they will stop assigning traits to characters according to their gender. It is interesting, for example, to examine Netflix’s “Grisalda”, starring Sofia Vergara, about the rise of a Colombian drug dealer who conquers Miami in the 1980s. The series begins with a quote from Pablo Escobar: “The scariest man I’ve ever met is a woman, her name is Griselda Blanco.” The very choice to focus on such a character indicates that we may see fewer characters defined only by what they have between their legs, and more characters defined purely by their humanity. One can hope that the figure of the man of the future will simply be a figure.